The Same Night Awaits Us All
Page 27
With endlessly long withered arms
Seizing, squeezing
Terrified hearts
At the back of each wall.
O night of nameless deeds!
—Both secret, and seen:
Again village greens carry scarlet stains.
Death screams in a severed throat are caught.
Again cruel clashing of shackle and chains
And the prison cells crowded.
In echoing courts
Of barracks and jails
Volleys ring to command.
Doors are locked,
Strangers knock.
In the porch with a gun
Sprawls a dying son.
Father hung.
Sister raped.
Uprooted from villages
Peasants are followed by troops
In grim convoy,
To be shot:
The order: “Halt!”
“Prepare to fire!”
The bolts clatter:
Ku
Klux
Klan—
“Fire !”
—Bullets spatter.
Ten bodies
Heavily
Plunge from the bank
Into the turbid grey River Maritsa,
Whose crimson flow
Carries away
Her sons in sorrow.
In distant deserted streets
Drums thud
As a band repeats:
“Maritsa murmurs . . .”
River of blood.
In the trampled
Thistle-grown fields
Where the grasses run wild
Roll scarlet heads
Defaced by knives.
Gallows outspread black arms
(Ghosts in a mist of death).
Ceaseless the merciless march of the axe
Against bone.
Villages blaze
Beyond the horizon.
Blood runs in torrents.
The death pyres’ hot flame
Sacrilegiously licks
The foot
Of God’s
Throne.
Live flesh roasts.
In high horror
The heavenly hosts
Exclaim
—A savage hosanna to God—
The end.
The hurricane ceased,
The storm
Stopped at last:
Over the land
Came
Peace
And silence.
The gods completed
Their bloody repast.
12
O Muse, now sing the Wrath of Achilles . . .
Achilles the strong brute,
The demon of war.
For long years the general
Of H. M. King Agamemnon.
Achilles the hero
With row upon row
Of crosses and medals and ribbons . . .
A pillar
Of order and peace
In the land . . .
But today
We no longer believe in heroes
—Not theirs, nor our own.
Troy burned, the city was razed.
Priam and Hecuba perished . . .
Achilles triumphs . . .
“What’s Hecuba to him?”
His brute savage heart
Does not hear
The wailing of mothers distraught
Over nameless graves sprinkled with blood,
So many
They cannot be numbered.
“What’s Hecuba to him?”
Achilles the hero.
Achilles was great.
God-sent scourge of God.
But Achilles shall perish in wrath and cursing.
—He perished,
his fall was a fall of shame:
The killer was truly repaid.
Agamemnon killed Iphigenia
—And perished:
Clytaemnestra killed Agamemnon
—And perished:
Orestes-Elektra killed Clytaemnestra
—They perished . . .
Alone there remains
Cassandra the seer,
Who stands and shall stay
Through the ages:
Speaking of vengeance
—And all shall come true.
Constant amusement, pastime, caprice
Of the gods.
Perpetual bloom of gods’ fury,
To whom all death is a jest,
All mourning revelry.
Death, murder and blood—
For how long must it be?
All-powerful Zeus,
Jupiter,
Ahuramazda,
Indra,
Tot,
Ra,
Jehovah,
Sabaoth:
—Reply!
From the smoke of the fires
Rise
Assailing the ears
The cries of the killed,
The roars
Of the numberless martyrs
On blazing wood pyres
—Who
Has betrayed our faith?
Reply!
You say nothing?
Don’t know?
—We do!
Look:
With one bound
We leap into Heaven:
DOWN WITH GOD!
—Heave a bomb at your heart
And take Heaven by storm:
DOWN WITH GOD!
From your throne
Send your dead
Down to the starless
Ironclad depths
Of the world’s great abyss—
DOWN WITH GOD!
From the boundlessly high
Bridge of the sky
With levers and ropes
We’ll bring down Heaven,
The land of our hopes,
Down
To the sorrowing
Blood-soaked
Earth.
All that the poets and philosophers wrote
Shall come true!
—No god! No master!
The month of September shall turn into May:
The life that men lead
From that day shall proceed
Ever upward, upward:
Earth shall be Heaven—
It shall!
Translated from the Bulgarian
by Peter Tempest, 1921
Hristo Karastoyanov is a multi-award winning contemporary Bulgarian novelist, playwright, and political essayist whose work has been translated into English, Turkish, and German. All seven of his novels have been shortlisted for the prestigious Helikon Award.
Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born writer and translator. She has written essays and critique in English and Bulgarian for the Chicago Reader, Publishing Perspectives, Banitza, Egoist, and others. She received a grant from English PEN for her work on The Same Night Awaits Us All.
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